Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Because It Depends on State, Moscow Patriarchate has Lost Ukraine and May Lose Even More, Kyiv Analyst Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, June 25 --There is no question that the Moscow
Patriarchate has alienated many Ukrainians because of its support for Kremlin
policy, but a Kyiv analyst suggests that its decline in Ukraine and more
generally also reflects the dependence its hierarchy has on state power,
something it no longer can count on having in Ukraine.

“The symphony with its own state has
become for the Russian Orthodox Church almost the capstone of church
construction, one that has already been converted into a kind of paradigmatic
dogma of Russian ecclesiology,” the Kyiv commentator points out, something that
works within one country but not across international boundaries.

As she points out, “it is difficult to
imagine a ‘ruling’ Church in Russia without Russia itself, outside the
boundaries of its bureaucratic apparatus and oligarchic circles whose leaders”
are deferred to and even called supporters of the Church itself. Thus, the
Russian Church has become part of “’a single fist.’”

But beyond the borders of the
Russian Federation, the situation is different, and “the longer the battle
lasts” between Russia and Ukraine, “the clearer it will become that Ukraine is
not Russia and will not be.” Consequently, “the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of
the Moscow Patriarchate cannot be the governing Church,” integrated as in
Russia with the state bureaucracy.

In short, “cloning Russian ways of
doing things and thus equating the status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in
Ukraine with the status of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia already is not
the case.”

The ROC MP’s inability to work with
the Ukrainian state the way it does with the Russian one is reinforced by its
ideological position.Ukrainian schools
aren’t interested in its obscurantist position, and Ukrainian military units
don’t share its view that they should be struggling for a common “Rus’.”

More generally, Derkach says,
Ukrainians are increasingly offended by the messages of priests and bishops of
the ROC MP that “Ukraine doesn’t exist and can’t,” that the Church should be
supporting anti-Ukrainian Cossack units, and that the Church leaders should be
openly lying about what Moscow is doing and clearly indifferent to what
Ukrainians are suffering.

Not allowing Patriarch Kirill to visit
Ukraine is not “interference” in the internal affairs of the Church, she
continues.His church sees itself as
part of a state but not of Ukraine, and consequently, keeping him out is just
as appropriate as keeping anyone trying to invade and conquer it.

Ukrainian laws are very clear on this point, starting with the law “on
freedom of conscience and religious organizations” adopted on April 23,
1991.That act specifies that the
government has the right to decide whether to admit religious activists who are
citizens of foreign states. Kirill is clearly in that category, and Ukraine is
obeying the law.

But
this decision points to another more far-reaching consequence. Because the ROC
MP is so thoroughly part of the Russian state, Derkach concludes, its
structures in Ukraine are unlikely to be able to survive. Ukraine is not
Russia, and its government won’t play in the kind of “symphony” Patriarch
Kirill and the ROC MP believe they must have, one in which the state and church
are fused together.

While
Derkach does not say so here, Kyiv’s refusal to have that kind of relationship
with the ROC MP or any other church shows that Ukraine unlike Russia is on the
way to arrangements typical in Europe, arrangements that open the way for
greater religious freedom not just for the Orthodox but for all believers as
well.